Hi guys, I hope you are marvellously well. In this Marketo office hour, we will focus on the analysis of a buyer journey in B2B, a real case, and what we could be taught about this journey. For instance, the fact that we have multiple actors and we need to treat them differently. The importance of creating content at the beginning of the journey to educate our prospect. The importance of the buyer groups and to treat them accordingly in the buyer journey. The crucial role of the brand ambassadors. And don't neglect what happens after you have won the opportunity. A lot could go wrong after that and you'd better have to automate what happened then. Let's go. Hey guys, I want to produce some content on the lead management because I see some trouble at my customer on this topic. But before diving into that, I wanted to have a real life example of a B2B journey, because we will see in this journey that there are plenty of things happening and it will be rich of teachings if we deep dive into it. So let's go. I took the example of Cathy, who is an employee of a French subsidiary of an American company, Acme. And she will want to be trained on Marketo to become self-reliant. So this is the journey that Cathy will go through and all her colleagues or partners and their journey will be divided in different phase: the discovery phase, the consideration phase, the decision phase here and the purchasing and invoicing phase. This is not a real life, but this is like an aggregation of plenty of cases I saw either at Merlin/Leonard or at my customers. And this is a very good example of what happens in real life. Just for you to understand, the blue boxes are the interactions that are invisible for me. And the purple one are the one that I will be able to see at Merlin/Leonard. So let's start. So Cathy is hired as marketing operation team and she has to work on Marketo. She's working in France in a French subsidiary of an American company. Her boss is Peter and Peter gives her a quick introduction on Marketo. The plan was to train Cathy, but unfortunately Peter is based in the USA and there's this big event coming and everybody is working on the preparation of this event, so he doesn't have much time to train Cathy. And so he asked Cathy to find a local solution to get trained. But she has a first training on Marketo. In parallel, she has asked Cathy to create a first email in Marketo, and Cathy realised very soon that Marketo is a powerful solution and she will need structured training, not a one hour free training that we can find on internet, that would not be enough. So that's the first decision she takes. So slowly Cathy is realising that she needs training and she understands what it takes to get trained. There are different training. So that's the discovery phase. And in this phase and in the next one, Cathy wants to get some information on training. She wants to be educated on how to get trained. And in this phase, she is absolutely not prepared to give her email in exchange for any content, obviously. So that's the start of the consideration phase. Cathy understands, wants to understand how she can tackle a training need. And she, as everybody will do, a quick search on Google or a preferred search engine on "formation Marketo", which is Marketo training in French. Obviously she will find the Adobe websites and some companies working on the topic in France. And despite she speaks perfectly English, she wants to get a training in French. So she will look, sorry, at some content on our website and the Merlin/Leonard website and especially the two article above here, how to get trained on Marketo and working on Marketo without any training, the 10 errors of the non-trained guy. And she's very interested of those two documents because she feels that Merlin/Leonard knows the topic. Here it's a purple box because I will, in Marketo, get a hint of Lucy arriving on my website, but she will be anonymous. That's the ghost here. And she will come on the Merlin/Leonard Academy. You will see that Merlin and Leonard proposes plenty of trainings, different levels on premises, remotely or completely self-based. And she will obviously look at some other websites from the competitor and she will take note for later. Again, she's not really here to leave her email to get some content, not yet. So the first conclusion she has is that she's a bit overwhelmed by the possibility of training, whether in France or abroad. And she remembers that she has a friend from university that's working on Marketo in another French company. So she calls her and after discussing with her, her friend who is Lucy tells her that there are some company who counts in France, especially Merlin/Leonard. And she was trained by us. So she recommends our training and especially the one hour free support we do every Friday on Marketo. Again, this interaction, I will not be able to see that, but this is crucial for me because here I've got an ambassador that will talk to a prospect, which is the best way to acquire a customer. So she comes back to us. Why is that? Because while browsing on Facebook, she sees a retargeting ad proposing a quiz to evaluate one's level on Marketo. That's the quiz in French, but it exists in English. She will do the quiz and obviously the quiz will propose to her to do the full training because she's a beginner and she will be able to see this pack. For the quiz to deliver the results, she had to leave her email. And in this case, she is ready to deliver email because we will provide to her some added value information which training to choose in all the trainings possible. So at this phase, she is ready to leave her email. So I will, that's the first time I will see Lucy, Cathy, sorry, popping up into my Marketo. She switched from anonymous to known and I will get her. So here, I haven't put any nurturing, any follow-up email on Cathy. I could do that, but that's for another time. So we enter now the decision phase and Cathy will discuss with our manager, telling what she's done, indicating that she likes all trainings at Merlin/Leonard and we have to choose whether the training will be online, self-paced or with a specific trainer and that could be on premises or through a visual course. And her manager remembers that there's another person working on Marketo in another view. And that would be a good idea to ask this person if he's interested or not. In the meantime, Peter will check the Merlin/Leonard website if we seem serious and he will be particularly interested by the reviews we have on our trainings. So here, Peter is anonymous. I see the visit on my website that again, just like Cathy at the beginning, is anonymous. I will not see him right away. So there's a discussion happening with Paul, who is the colleague from the other view. And Paul, yeah, Paul says he needs some training too. He has happy to have the opportunity to be included in Cathy's training. So the discussion ends up with, yeah, we need to train two people. And in the meantime, Peter will look at some videos while browsing on our website because his topic currently is to try to create some meaningful dashboards. And we have some videos on that, but there are Marketo office hour records that will only play if you leave your email after 30 seconds. So that's where I will see Peter arriving in my system. He will arrive from the videos, but the video system is synced with Marketo. I will see Peter arriving in Marketo with the mention that he viewed this video. Now that we've decided that we need — they need, sorry — they need a training for two people. Lucy will organise a conference call with us, with Merlin/Leonard and our HR departments to understand if this training can be financed. So this is a very specific mechanism for France where every month in the salary, in the wages, the government takes some money to pool some resources for training people. And then when you train people, you can ask money from this pool and get some financing. That's, yeah, that's a bit crazy, but that's the French way of organising the training. So this mechanism is very important for the training in France. So there's, Lucy will enter this contact form and take a meeting with us. So again, I will see Cathy here arriving with a new interaction. Paul will see, will do the same quiz as Cathy. So here I will see Paul arriving in my Marketo. That's the third person from this company I will see in my system. And Lucy will — sorry, Cathy will — forward the invitation to this guy, Thomas, who is working in the HR department. So I will see Thomas in the meeting and Thomas here is a peculiar person in the process. Thomas has not to be convinced just like Paul or Cathy or Peter. Thomas has just the power to say no. So this person wants, has been alerted that there will be a training taking place on Marketo for Cathy and Paul. And he will look at our website to see the keyword Qualiope, because that means that we are certified for this financing mechanism. So he browses our website and here is anonymous and he finds the keyword. So he sees that we are certified and he's reassured. And the next phase, he will want to, in the call to check that we are really Qualiope certified. So this is a topic we'll talk in the conference call and he will come, he will be known in my system at this step. So the meeting here will be with Lucy, Peter and Thomas and myself from Merlin/Leonard. And the decision here is to train Lucy and Paul with a dedicated trainer. So this meeting will be a recording in our system and it will be a new interaction for Cathy, Peter and Thomas. So that's the end of the decision phase here, but there's a phase very important after that. That's the purchasing and invoicing phase. And in my experience, a lot of worn opportunities are lost here because the, because there are some condition to be passed here that sometimes prevents to do the business. So basically I will send a quote to training contract and a training plan to Cathy or Peter. And here Peter will discuss with the manager of the (inaudible) to share the cost of the training. And here, that's a condition, that's a hidden condition for me that could derail the whole process because the (inaudible) manager obviously should say, yes, we will share the cost. But if he says, no, I don't have any budget, we will come back to before saying, OK, I, Peter will not finance the training for your guy. And we will come back to training just Cathy. And in this case, we could decide not to get trained with a consultant, but with a self-based training. So that's good, not jeopardise the training, but the kind of training we will do. Thomas will prepare the financing demand for the organism that manages the financing pool, which is called an op-co. So this is the op-co here. And so there are two actors arriving in this process, Francis from the finance department and the op-co, which we will have to convince to finance this training. So Thomas prepared the financing and push the demands to the op-co. And again, the op-co has the power to say no. And here we don't have much leverage to influence the op-co. So here, hopefully the op-co says, yes, so I will be able to invoice, thanks. And I will invoice not the ACME, but I will invoice the op-co. That's again, very specific to France. Francis from the financing department will have to register Merlin/Leonard in the purchasing system. And again, Francis could say no or could make things difficult. For instance, he could say, we have this process to rationalising the number of suppliers. We don't accept currently new suppliers. So you have to go through another company to invoice us. And that's something I could refuse. Or Francis could ask, as it happens very often, a lot of question on the financials of Merlin/Leonard, financials I'm not so eager to give to another company. And I could say,####I will not give those KPIs. And again, Francis could say, I don't have the KPIs. I won't want to register Merlin/Leonard. And this could jeopardise the entire business. So again, that's something very difficult to prepare. So here, hopefully everything runs smoothly and I could invoice. And this is the end of the buyer journey and I will get paid. But we have six lessons and six best practices here in this, looking at this buyer journey. Obviously, we've seen that there are many people involved in this B2B customer journey. And they don't have absolutely not, they absolutely don't have all the same business need. Whether it's Cathy who wants to get trained, Peter who wants to get some reinsurance about the sustainability of Merlin/Leonard and the fact that we will be able to answer all their business needs, Francis in the financing department who wants some financing KPIs or Thomas who want to get sure that we are certified. We cannot feed them with the same information. So that would be a terrible idea, for instance, to create a nurturing dedicated to training. And as soon as someone arrives around this topic to shoot the training to, for instance, explain how to get trained on Marketo, these are the different ways to get trained. What are the different levels in Marketo? What is the Marketo certification? That would be very interesting for Cathy, but obviously not for Peter, Francis and Thomas. Whose reaction will certainly be, oh, again, with those marketing nurturing was with those marketing (inaudible) campaigns. I will unsubscribe at once from that. So in order to avoid that, we need to enrich the customer profile as soon as possible because we want to know if Cathy is in the marketing operation departments, if Thomas is in the HR and Francis in the finance department. With this information, we could push some information regarding the training, but suitable for their specific job position. And I don't see a lot of company who are enriching their database with external database and signals on the company. With that, we can propose not the same nurturing for all, but personalised nurturing for all of them. We have to remember that some of them are to be convinced to say yes, and other are here just to say no if something's wrong. So that's not the same mechanism for marketing. And a quick remark regarding the reporting we will do at the end of the month on this process. Here, if I look at my traditional lead management reporting that we have every month, I will basically see how many leads did we generate this month for Merlin/Leonard or for this offer training. And here, I would be tempted to count five because I will have in the end, Cathy, Peter, Paul, yeah, Thomas and Francis. We will not see the outcome. So they are, I generated five leads. That's great. And this led to one opportunity, one with this amount. And if we calculate the conversion rate, that would be 20%, but that would be a mistake in my view. Because why is that? Because Peter, Paul, Thomas and Francis, they all came from Cathy. Cathy wouldn't be here. All those guys wouldn't be here. So basically it's just one business need around Cathy that's needed a buying group of five people or maybe two person because there's Paul, there is Paul who will do the training. But we have two people that need a buying group of five; that will lead to two opportunities. So for me, the right conversion rate will be 100% because we have generated one business need here that led to one opportunity one and not five to one or — yeah, or five to two opportunities if we split the trainings. So it has a huge impact. And that's something we don't see very often, this notion of buying group. We either manage person in Marketo or companies, but not a group per se, a buying group. So I am actually looking at that in marketing Salesforce, how to easily create that. And if possible, aggregate those people automatically in the same buying group because they are in the same timeframe. I will see people from Acme arriving in the same timeframe with the same business need. So if we could say same company, same timeframe, same business need, that could match a business group. Obviously there will be exceptions, but that would be a first good approach to try to automate that. So automate that in Salesforce, that should be possible, and then into Marketo. And the fact that we automate that and we aggregate those guy, that will help create a better reporting on that, on the lead management, and would help with what kind of email, what kind of notary should we send to this buying group? The second point is that our perception of the customer journey is partial at best. Just look at all the blue boxes versus the purple boxes. All the beginning of the buyer journey is blue, or anonymous here. So we detect only the person we, into our Marketo at the end of the consideration phase or beginning of the decision phase. And what we saw is that the prospect will educate himself or herself. And if we don't provide the content for that, our competitor will do. So that's again, it's obvious, but we need to create non-gated content for this phase that will provide added value information and build some trust with the prospect. The gated content could only be here at the end of this phase. So don't forget to create educational content and try to listen to everything you could. So here, you must have a centralised view of what happens on your website, the chatbot, the chatbox, videos, the quiz, the calls, the emails. The more it connects all your systems and the more you have a 360 degree view of all the person and the buying group, the better. Yeah, so I talk about that, sorry. The prospect will get educated either on your website or on your competitor. So create non-gated content to educate the prospect. And we could propose in the nurturing, in the nurturing, we send to Cathy because we recognise that Cathy is the marketing operation. So we have a dedicated nurturing on training, dedicated nurturing on the training topic for Cathy. And at the end of this nurturing, we could include emails for the interested parties in the HR department or in the finance department where Cathy could forward to them automatically the information. So for the HR, that would be all the information regarding the Qualliope certification. For the finance department, that will be all the information on the available financial KPAs for Merlin/Leonard and plenty of document that we have to supply regarding the fiscal and social laws in France. The better we anticipate all that, the sooner we anticipate all that, the better. So recognise and manage the buying group. Yes, I think that's a key challenge for lead management in B2B in the next weeks, months or years. We absolutely must treat as one entity this buying group, those five people we saw. They are not people not having anything to do altogether. We must manage this buying group. And in the big organisation, in enterprise accounts, we have to manage several buying groups that can have different business need at the same time, but completely separated. So that's something we need to do. Hopefully, we absolutely must have in our database our brand ambassadors. So here I'm talking about Lucy, whose role is crucial for winning this opportunity. Certainly without Lucy's feedback to Cathy, winning this opportunity would have been more difficult for me. So here to have that, we could either ask Cathy in face-to-face, the first time we have her on the phone or in a video call, hey, how did you get to know her? How did you hear from us? And she will talk about Lucy. And this is where I should have in my CRM the ability to tag easily that Lucy played a key role in this opportunity. Why is that? Because I want to recognise Lucy. I want to talk to her and thank her for what she did, because if she did that once, she could do that twice, three times, four times. And I could create this ambassador programme where Lucy, I could send a thank you card for the new year to Lucy or a mug or a hoodie or whatever, whatever she wants, because that's basically easy business when you have satisfied customer talking about you. You absolutely want to leverage that. And the last point is that a lot can happen after the go. So that would be a bad idea for the salesperson to absolutely push all the process into the hands of the HR or the finance department. You have to follow up your opportunity until it's paid, because that's really when the opportunity is won. It's not when it's won in Salesforce, it's when it's won and the money is in the bank. So here, what we could do is prepare in the (inaudible) or in separated email, all the different documents needed for the different purchasing legal or HR department. And that will show that we are a serious company with professional processes. And the last thing we could put, for instance, if I take back the fact that the manager from the other, but you didn't want to pay for Paul. So in the end, there's a discussion saying, oh, I will not train with a certified consultant. We will take the sales-based training just for Cathy. And that will be a completely different price from what was won in Salesforce. And it's not sure that this will be modified in the opportunity by the sales at this point. But at some point in the bank, we will have some money arriving. So I have that in my Salesforce. I have all the invoices with the real amount that's been paid. And I, the invoices are linked to the project. The project are linked to opportunities they come from. And I have this mechanism to push back the real invoiced and paid amount on the project, then on the opportunities, the different opportunities. And I have this dashboard showing exactly the discrepancies between what was forecasted by the sales in the one opportunity, what has been paid. And I can correct retroactively the opportunities. Why is that important? Because all the attribution model of the revenue is based on the one opportunities amounts. So if I have a huge difference, a huge error on my one opportunity amounts, all my attribution model will put wrong amounts on the campaigns and my (inaudible) will be wrong. So that's something I, again, see pretty rarely at my customers. But that's a very good idea to put this feedback loop from the finance department back to the opportunities. I'm not saying it's easy, but at least you will have a correct attribution model. So that's all for the, all the teachings we could get from the B2B buying journey. So key points to keep in mind, try to put with yourselves a real life B2B journey, just like I did with all the key actors that took a part. Just check that, all the interaction that we're not collecting yet, that we could collect in the future, what could we do better? Do we manage our brand ambassador? Do we have enough automation after the one? Do we have this feedback loop from the finance? Do we have educational content at the beginning? So for instance, here, there was, there were no nurturing that was shoot once Lucy arrived after the quiz. So that would be something that we could do better. And do we manage buying groups? The topic of my next Marketo hour will be the lead management and how do we translate all that into Marketo and into the CRM that there will be maybe many sessions, but that's something we will address very soon. Talk to you soon. Bye bye, guys.